


requiem for dying mothers

by theatrythms



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Afterlife, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force ghost!Padmé, Gen, Jedi!Lyra Erso, Mentions of Death, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mother-Son Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-04 13:44:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17305682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theatrythms/pseuds/theatrythms
Summary: Padmé exists where life is lived, where mothers mourn, fathers grieve and children are orphaned. All this time, the rebellion fell to her like a crutch, when they broke apart families. Someone had to pick up all that was left.Or; Padme Amidala, the patron saint of suffering mothers and their children.





	requiem for dying mothers

**Author's Note:**

> oh jeez i just love padmé so so much . i have no idea how she'd manage to become a force ghost but im saying that motherly love and bitterness keeps her tied to the mortal plane . i also made lyra a jedi bc ive had that idea in my head for literally two years but i think it makes the connection of the force and rogue one stronger . anyway enjoy reading !!!

 

 

 

_Shmi_

requiem for dying mothers pt. 1

 

The force has always been bright and warm. Something to lean against when her knees shook and her head swam in the desert heat.

 

When they take her boy, it came to her in a flood of light, to cushion the sorrow.

 

“Your son will someday save the universe.” The Jedi say, and it helps heal the hurt.

 

A voice that feels familiar that she will never meet whispers to her. “Because there is good in him, I’ve felt it.” His eyes are the same blue as her son’s and he knows the sands of Tatooine.

 

And calm washes over.

 

Years later, when she is long embedded in the warmth of the Force, that girl who came with the Jedi stands beside her and they watch the galaxy burn.

 

 

 

_Breha_

how wonderful life is

now you’re in the world

 

When Bail hands her this stunning little girl, there’s a bright spark in her chest. The girl is awake and Breha feels haunted by Padmé’s eyes looking into her’s.

 

Born grieving, Breha notes, and all of a sudden she misses her friend an awful lot.

 

“She’s beautiful.” Breha says instead, kisses her nose and the wisp of dark hair adorning her crown. This child was always a princess. “Does she have a name.”

 

“Padmé named her Leia.” Bail’s voice still has aftershocks of grief in it. “And I’d like to honor that.”

 

Breha understands with a sad smile. “I’d like to honor that too,” She muses, eyes drifting back to the baby, “Our Princess Leia.”

 

Breha feels it then, something fierce and pulsing rocking over her. Her daughter will truly rattle the stars; meant for more than royalty, and with a life of sadness but so full of love.

 

Her daughter will be as resilient as her mother is; as her mother was.

 

When the light hits Alderaan, Breha wants nothing more than to see her daughter again, in all her bright fury and wisdom, with all her rage and honor. Bail told her of Scarif, of Jedha, only moments before, and as the red clouds come closer and closer, Breha thinks this will be quick and painless. The only pain in death comes from the ache she will leave in her daughter.

 

Leia was all she ever asked for in a child. The only thing she’d ever wanted for so long. And she’d had nineteen happy, happy years with her.

 

Breha falls and feels something catch her, something wrap its arms around her tightly and soundly, a sound far off of someone weeping, the whirl of a medical droid in the distance. Padmé screaming on an operating table fades to Padmé in front of her; dressed in the cosmos and smiling through tears. It makes sense, that Padme was the one to hold her, to protect her in the dark.

 

“Thank you,” She murmurs, as the stars of Alderaan fall around them. “For all you did for her, thank you.”

 

Breha had nineteen happy years. “Thank you, Padmé.”

 

 

 

_Lyra_

sons and daughters;

may you kill what my blind heart

could not

 

Young Padawans on the cusp of adulthood, feeling their lives drip away with monotony; a dull circle of forms and prayers and meditation. It was enough, for Lyra, in her own way. When the Clone Wars erupted she opted to stay in the temples across the universe; Lyra was a scholar before she was a Jedi Knight, and she was hardly ashamed of that.

 

But then Espinar happened, sitting with her friends in tunnels, the blue glow of her saber bright against the dark walls. Galen Erso was already greying in his late-twenties and he stuttered over his words when he had to address the expedition.

 

They sent a team of Jedi down to Espinar to investigate new crystals, a new way to power sabers, a new light against the stars. Lyra went to Espinar and ended up falling in love with a scientist.

 

“The Force works in strange ways.” Her master had said against the crown of her head. “Maybe this is the way your life was supposed to lead.”

 

She was never suited for the war that was looming on the horizon.

 

Her master was a greying woman, eyes darker than deep space and an affinity for keeping younglings in their place better than Yoda. Her hands were deft when she disassembled her lightsaber, all the silver metal falling apart. She looped a string around the tip of the kyber crystal; slightly cloudy and losing its shine, after so many years of dedicated use, and tied it around her apprentice’s neck.

 

(Years later, trying to keep a bouncing toddler still on a ship to Coruscant, she hears that General Skywalker’s Padawan has left the order, through the whispering Clones. Anakin Skywalker was six years younger than her and much more powerful than her, and now he’s the hero of the war, and Lyra Erso is a tired, haggard mother trying to get across space, and that is how the Force has willed it.)

 

Jyn deserved more than her parents; a sad, worried scientist and a former Jedi that shut herself off.

 

And as she dies, she falls hard into the Force, kicking and screaming and pulling at the seams of space, trying to crawl back.

 

“I can’t leave him! I can’t let them take him!”

 

The last thing she sees was Orson Krennic’s twisted grin, the recoil of the blaster flying toward her. There’s anger in being powerless in death, anger the Jedi pushed away, anger she feels in the Force right now.

 

The wind rushes into her like a hurricane, warm and open. White swaths of stars link around her; a woman’s voice she remembers from the days of the Republic pulls her closer. “Your girl will do so much in this universe.

 

A voice echoes forward, full of that anger and harshness. “My father’s revenge. He built a flaw in the Death Star. He put a fuse in the middle of your machine and I’ve just told the entire galaxy how to light it.” It feels full of hope. Full of the legends the Jedi would share. Full of the stories the war heroes would tell. Feels grounded against the smell of salt water and the course touch of sand.

 

She never gave Jyn everything she could. If she gave her anything it was anger. A foolish amount, but the Jedi lessons and psalms eroded away as Lyra got older and older and more jaded. She never did teach her anything of those old legends, older than the universe itself.

 

But her daughter will save the universe, and that is more of a solution than what the Jedi ever tried to teach.

 

 

 

_Hera_

so many stories i want to tell you  
i wish that i could show you the many things i've seen  
you and your daddy, you both look like poets

 

When they give her her boy, he is born quiet, already thinking and deep in contemplating.

 

It makes her laugh, when the medroid is whirling around to check his vitals. He’s breathing, big and heavy breaths that seem like such herculean efforts. The first thing Jacen Syndulla hears is the sound of his mother’s laughter, that richoques across the force when he needs to hear it, coming back to round him out.

 

A child born in war has thunder in his veins. A quiet smoldering underneath his skin. When the war ends, and Luke Skywalker looks for Jedi for his school, it takes a gentle nudge from Ezra, and a lot of long, painful conversations with the Ghost Crew, all starting with that tell-tale question.

 

“Can you tell me what my dad was like? Please?”

 

Jacen loves to fly, to freefall into hyperspace and reach for stars. But there’s a calmness to him, a sense of reason deep in his bone marrow, in all his beautiful cells. He’s his father’s son, she notes, when they hand her back her baby, after the medroids have cleaned him and wrapped him, the ice of Hoth never being more welcoming. He’s his father’s son when his anger flares, when he pinches his nose and sighs, when he’s old enough and experienced enough as a Jedi to teach the new recruits of Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Temple. But he has her gentleness, and grounded reason, and open heart.

 

“Jacen, huh?” Sabine says, and rubs his forehead with gentle fingers. “He would've liked that a lot.”

 

Even Leia Organa, comes to visit him. Five years later Hera is brushing thick, dark hair out of a baby boy’s eyes, cooing over his round cheeks.

 

“This is Ben, Jacen, you’re gonna have to look out for him,” Leia instructs, always the diplomat, and her hair piled up in braids. “You’re going to have to be a good example for him.”

 

Jacen just grins, peppers a kiss to Ben’s wide forehead and pinky promises Han Solo that he’ll teach him to fly.

 

(Decades later, Ben Solo runs a lightsaber through her son’s chest. All Luke says is that he was trying to save the younglings, and didn’t flinch in the face of death.)

 

Han Solo never meets her eyes again. Leia Organa Solo makes a point to look her in her eyes.

 

Hera never had much belief in the Force. For most of the time she had with Kanan he didn’t either. All Hera can hope, is that something as strong as that greeted him, the way it found her. A woman draped in golden light finds her in a hangar in Yavin IV, and sweeps through the Force swiftly, green eyes meet deep, deep brown.

 

(One mother who has lost her son and another is about to meet him for the first time in the power of the Force. Luke Skywalker has hours left and the Force knows it. Especially this golden woman.)

 

And no words pass. Just a sad nod, before she guides a gaggle of young cadets onto a departing freighter.

 

Hera just hopes someone greets him. Someone with his bright eyes and smile. Someone who rattled the clouds. Someone who knew him before Hera even did.

 

 

 

_Leia_

of course i blame me

when you get free

i hope you find peace

 

At twenty four, Leia starts to pour through the history salvaged. The datapads slip through her hands like sand, ending up on the floor of her office.

 

There’s one aim. Find her mother, the woman who gave birth to her the same day the Republic died.

 

History is altered of course, but the Empire remembers Padmé Amidala warmly, almost like an old friend. Darth Sidious was Nabooian too, and even when their home world burned as the Rebellion infected each planet, the people choose their champion.

 

Padmé’s body lies in state.

 

On a whim, a strange desire, a rumbling through the Force that urges her there, she drags Han out to the lake planet, ignoring his moans and bitching when her nausea sends her into the bunks of the Millennium Falcon. Something called her to Naboo, the same way it called her to Cloud City to find Luke. That same, familial pull.

 

It brings her to a dead woman, the sunlight streaming through the greens and blues and yellows of the stained glass window. Her casket is closed, but Leia’s done enough research of her funeral, and the blue dress that flowed like a river.

 

This woman’s presence is everywhere now, the way it’s always been in her smile, in her bone marrow, in her, in every way.

 

Even if she didn’t know.

 

Eight months later, she has Ben. He’s three weeks late, and turned over twice. The medroids remove him from her, and he cries at the first sound and sight.

 

A horrible, slick dread fills Leia as the monitors beep. The world around her is shifting. Chewie roars, Luke is crying big, bright happy tears and Han’s silence and awe is deafening.

 

Outside of her, she can’t keep him safe. At the back of her mind, the woman in all the data pads, streams of senate hearings, the girl-queen with fangs, lays a gentle hand on her forehead, and guides her through. Leia swallows a painful sob when they give her Ben, the briefest of glances to wet black hair and a red, angry face.

 

In her dreams, Padmé Amidala is on a medical table and screaming and dying, her life force draining quickly. She lives long enough to name her children and that is that; a light snuffed out and thrown into the Force.

 

But somehow she managed to manipulate it. Padmé’s ghost is older than the rebellion itself, strolling around medical bases, when women begin labour. around where children play, around Leia and Luke.

 

(But not that they knew.)

 

Padmé exists where life is lived, where mothers mourn, fathers grieve and children are orphaned. All this time, the rebellion fell to her like a crutch, when they broke apart families. Someone to pick up all that was left.

 

It’s Padmé who holds her hand and senses the darkness in Ben. When her boy hides himself away in the shadows of his room, a Padmé sits in deep blue and rainbow wool, her curls messy in the heat of the room. She acts as a wedge between one troubled boy and a sixth Lord tethered to a sinister force.

 

But Leia knows only Ben can save himself. Her mother leaves the same day Ben does, packed into the Millennium Falcon, watery brown eyes and the promise that the New Jedi Order will bring peace to him. Jacen Syndulla greets him.

 

Her mother returns minutes before Luke calls. In her dreams, in the days and months and years after the attack, she can see the burning hutts, the screams from students, and her baby boy’s scared eyes, wide and watery as he cuts down Jedi. Luke tells her everything and she doesn’t see him until he lands on Crait.

 

(It’s a terrible thing in the world, for a Skywalker to be alone.)

 

Padmé is there, hair piled at the nape of her neck. “...stop! Things don’t have to end this way! No more fighting, please!” She holds her hands protectively over her stomach, and watches the world burn and burn and burn.

 

The years stretch on. The New Republic was built on a rebellion and like old habits, the ships and bases and numbers begin to swell again. Senator Organa-Solo falls to General Organa and she hasn’t heard from Han in years. Not since Ben left.

 

Behind the gate on Crait, Leia feels that dark, dreadful aura again. Kylo Ren is just across the space; the no-man’s land the rebels claim first. The red salt flakes and flies like blood. For the first time in years, this is the closest Leia has been to her son. With a gentle probe, it feels like she could reach out to him, reach across the Force and take him. Bring him back to her, when everyone else fails.

 

It’s Padmé’s hard eyes that tell her not too. Her mother lived alongside Ben for all his years of isolation. She’s seen the man he is in all his colours. Another young Jedi lost to the dark side. Padmé’s heavy sigh feels like an earthquake, that shudders all around, down to the core of the planet and rattles across the stars.

 

“There will be another time.” She whispers, a sad smile frozen to her. It’s only now, Leia sees how young Padmé is, a young woman with old eyes, a childless mother caught in the inbetween. The Jedi pass through the Force in a quick transition. Padmé has watched the world end and rise and end again.

 

So, instead Leia sends her strength to Luke, watches the duel.

 

 

 

_Padmé_

share with me the sun  
you forget sometime it's ours

you carried us all  
down from the stars

 

Sometimes, Padmé swears she’s been left in some galactic-limbo. Tied to the stars and tethered to the Force.

 

She supposes it’s from her marriage, her and the strong life force of her children. But when the war breaks out, and fighting across the stars begins, there’s a swift calling. Greater than anything else.

 

Padmé watches families crack apart at the seams, ripped at the edges and torn apart. Her family reflects the universe this war wages in; her children on opposite ends of the galaxy, her husband is evil and insane and it still hurts unbelievably to think about it.

 

She’s too far from them to see them. Luke has sandy hair and an ache to be more than his home world. There’s a raging fire trapped in Leia’s eyes, broad shoulders to hold up the universe.

 

It saddens Padmé, to think about all the pain they will have to face. In Luke’s young smile she sees his grief and loss and fear. In Leia’s firm voice she hears her pain and worry and anger.

 

Tied to a universe collapsing in on itself, Padmé sees Anakin. His breathing echoes across the silence between them. And in pain and rage and sorrow Padmé cut them apart.

 

(She once believed there was good in him. Obi-Wan lives on Tatooine and even he’s lost the hope she carried with her into death. With this vision the Force has granted her she sees her husband enter the Jedi Temple and slaughter younglings and the pain hurt so much she sent the planets flying.)

 

So Padmé tries to right these wrongs. It’s a small feat but she tries, against the smug hold of the Force. The Force is strong, but one mother’s love is stronger, as she dives apart the world.

 

To help. Or at least, to not hurt.

 

It all blends together over the years. Mothers and their children, fathers and their children, mothers and daughters and grandfathers and grandchildren and in all the time she spent away her children are grown. She stands next to a fading Shmi Skywalker and shoulders the hurt. The woman was a husk in life and alive against the stars.

 

It’s hard, Padmé thinks, to blink and suddenly your child has lived longer than you. Shmi saw this every day. Padmé blinks and Luke is holding a lightsaber. Padmé blinks and Leia is orphaned again, Alderaan splintering across the galaxy, a thousand voices crying out against the stars.

 

“Aren’t you a little short to be a stormtrooper?”

 

Padmé blinks and her children are reunited again.

 

“I’m Luke Skywalker I’m here to rescue you!”

 

Padmé blinks and Luke blows up the Death Star, blinks and Leia leads the rebellion, blinks the Battle of Endor closes the war and

 

“Leia, do you remember your mother, your real mother?”

 

(Above all, she hopes they know that they are loved.)

 

“She was, very beautiful, kind, but sad. Why are you asking me this?”

 

(Sneaking around the edges of Alderaan and Tatooine, those lonely years when Leia is only learning to speak and Luke begins to race the twin suns in the sand dunes.)

 

Blinks, and Anakin Skywalker has joined her in the Force. He’s younger, with clear eyes and a laugh that rings across the galaxy. He looks the same as he did that last time Padmé saw him when she was alive and it hurts to see him.

 

He’s trapped in his own penance, cursed to watch over the echoes his beliefs and ideology brought. Padmé wants nothing to do with him.

 

(Not yet anyway. There’s the brief moments when they’re close enough to each other she feels his atoms reach out to hers. Like Leia’s wedding, or Ben’s birth. But they are just ghosts and the world underneath them is alive and well.)

 

(Her pain is felt across the universe, how unfair everything is, when Luke gives his sister away at her wedding, because now both of her fathers and mothers are dead, and Luke and Leia are all they have in the world now. How unfair it is, that Padmé deserved a life where she raised her babies, with or without him and how unfair it is that this all happened to them.)

 

But Ben is her special case. She senses Snoke the same time he does, alone in the shadows. When he’s nine he likes to hide in his room and stay away from the world, so Padmé joins him and he thinks she’s an angel. Not the first lonely nine year old to say that but it still breaks her heart.

 

In the end Padmé isn’t a Jedi. With bitter tears she watches him slip out of her grasp, out of her hold and into the dark side. The universe goes black, as Padmé thinks of another young boy she’s let down, another strength lost to the dark.

 

(Padmé needs to remember there was nothing else she could do for either of them.)

 

A war breaks out and Padmé is needed again. She leaves Ben to Anakin, and feels her husband’s regret across the skies.

 

Padmé is needed again; in funerals and weddings and births. Parents bury their children and children are born in war. One little girl is dropped onto a desert planet so like her Luke was. She looks to the skies and wants to go home. The First Order begins their stormtrooper campaign and there’s the cries of children stretching out to her.

 

Two children, one in the sand of Jakku and the other in the snow on Starkiller Base. Two extraordinary children, who will mean so much to one another. Padmé visits in their dreams and lingers in the elements. If there is anything else she can tell them, it is they are absolutely not alone.

 

Somewhere along the way all these pieces line up. The Resistance takes on new life, Han Solo falls back into the Force, her son takes on a new Padawan and the Resistance is sent spiraling.

 

Blinks, and Luke fades into the Force with her, young again and eyes the colour of the sky. Blinks, and Leia is alone. Blinks and there is one Jedi left.

 

(And what a lonely thing that is. Obi-Wan’s grief swallows the universe whole.)

 

Empires and Republics have risen and fallen, in the space between Padmé meeting her son and joining him in the Force. He surrounds her in swaths of stars and constellations line up between them, keeping them held together.

 

“...Strike me down in anger and I'll always be with you.”

 

Luke has to stay too. He has a purpose to Ben, a promise, that Leia can’t do on her own. Not everyone gets to move on and not everyone should.

 

(Anakin Skywalker, despite his grandson’s devotion to him, has never been able to get through to Ben. Anakin stands on Starkiller Base and his rage sharpens the lights and darkens the day. He just stands there and screams and screams and screams.)

 

“I failed him.” Luke’s words are hollow. “And for that I’m sorry.”

 

Obi-Wan is heard all around them. “I loved you Anakin! You were my brother!”

 

And just as these Force-ghosts mourn and weep and remember, The Resistance, has already formed again, in the metal shell of the Millennium Falcon.

 

“How do we build a rebellion from this?”

 

Padmé is tired of watching the universe collapse under itself again, folding into all the cracks that went ignored for so long.

 

“We have everything we need.” Leia’s voice is sure and soft, and it ricochets off the universe, and into every planet and system.

 

Everything we need, includes one mother as the keeper of the universe.

  


**Author's Note:**

> this is sort of a songfic i guess but the songs i used were  
> shmi - requiem for dying mothers by stars of the lid  
> breha - your song by elton john  
> lyra - winter solstice by cold specks  
> hera - the light by regina spektor  
> leia - happy birthday johnny by saint vincent  
> padmé - you carried us (share with me the sun) by portugal the man  
> i wrote this mainly bc i really love the familial relationships in star wars and how special and sacred at the core of star wars is your family/chosen family . thank u for reading !!!!!!


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